"Wikipedia is down: Good thing it’s summer, students," ran a wry TheNextWeb headline. Wikipedia has come under criticism by some in the academic community, who say students make little effort to distinguish between its user-generated information and more credible data.

"Wikipedia Is Down. How can I do my homework now?" one unhappy Wiki fan tweeted during the outage.

The online "encyclopedia" is accessed by an average of 25 million people per day.

It took the company approximately one hour to get up and running after the outage was discovered.